Rubio and the Mirage of Republican Renewal

Walter Russell Mead’s analysis of the current state of the GOP leaves something to be desired:

That Marco Rubio, a young, Hispanic senator whose message is pitched to middle-class and aspiring middle-class voters, has emerged as a prominent force in the party shows that the process of rebranding and renewal is still at work in the GOP.

It’s true that the Republican Party isn’t “dead,” but we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that Rubio’s talk of an “opportunity gap” represents reform or renewal in the party. It represents some awareness on Rubio’s part of worsening social mobility in the U.S., to which he seemed to be oblivious in the past, but acknowledging a problem is different from addressing it. Reviewing what Rubio proposed in his speech at the Jack Kemp Foundation, one will not find very much that is new or different in the policy ideas that Rubio has in mind.

A politician can sing the praises of the middle class while supporting policies that neglect its most pressing concerns. As we go through the list of Rubio’s proposals, we find that he is opposed to increasing taxes, wants to limit regulation, supports increased domestic energy production, favors making price stability the only mandate of the Federal Reserve, endorses health savings accounts, and backs charter schools and school choice. These may or may not be advisable positions, but almost none of them is directly relevant to the problems he identifies. Some of these ideas are no different from what Romney proposed during the election campaign, and some are old GOP standbys that have been knocking around for fifteen or twenty years. That doesn’t necessarily make them wrong, but they don’t represent renewal, and they have little or nothing to offer large numbers of middle-class Americans. Republicans have been running on some combination of these policies for a long time, and most Americans have evidently been underwhelmed by the message and by the results for most of the last two decades.

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5 Responses to Rubio and the Mirage of Republican Renewal

The Republican Party establishment knows exactly what it will take to be successful again. The problem is to be successful they have to ignore the big donors and actually do something for the middle class like go after businesses that hire illegals or stop the guest worker scam.

The leaders still think they can get through one more election where they promise something and deliver nothing. After 30 years, this game is played out. Rubio on the ticket won’t get the Latinos and he won’t get the white working class.

The Republican Party is really averse to opening the question of class to public debate, and so they’re maintaining a defensive posture on class-related issues, hoping that a small change in the window-dressing will keep their house in order. It won’t.

Republicans will have to develop a political vocabulary to situate opposition to government spending as something that will actually help the poor. They’re not doing this because it’s politically very risky: To do so, they’d have to bring up arguments that would cut equally well (or even better) against the most popular entitlements for retirees. To make the argument really forceful, they’d also need to question some of their own pork-barrel sacred cows like military spending and farm subsidies. So this isn’t going to happen until the party gets really, really desperate.

In the antebellum South there was a certain cohort of slaves that drew its status from the status of the master. These slaves, working hardest to ensure the success of the master – and, hence, their own status – were the standard the slave owning class held up as both the natural order of things and the aspiration of all right-thinking slaves. And as long as enough accepted their lot, the system worked fine . . . especially for the planter elite. It doesn’t take much to see libertarian philosophy as a paean to the wage slave.

To argh: Regulation (writ large) is a necessary part of civilization. The question is whether government regulation or the regulation of the market serves better the interest of the middle class. Rubio insists it is the latter, but I suspect he would have you believe a truly free market, not a market captured by the special, privileged interests that so thoroughly dominate today’s marketplace. Cf, the “death panels” of Obamacare vs every insurance company that denies coverage for a given course of treatment.